What's the Matter with Delaware? by Hal Weitzman;

Author:Hal Weitzman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Of course, the trustees approved the measure knowing full well that they could point to Delaware State as a higher educational institution designed for Black students, thereby enabling them to keep their university virtually whites only.

After Delaware State failed to win accreditation in 1949, ten of its former students requested the following January that the University of Delaware give them application forms so that they could apply for admission. The university refused, citing the 1948 resolution in its rejection letter to several of the students, while blocking two others for failing to specify what courses of study they wished to pursue. One student, Daniel Moody, received a letter simply saying he was ineligible to apply “as a colored person.”21

It was clear that, aside from the matter of accreditation, the two institutions were indeed separate but far from equal. The quality of education at Delaware State fell “short of acceptable standards” and the school’s “education services were poorly articulated and coordinated,” according to a 1949 report by the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. “The present financial resources of the college do not permit the college to meet its presently stated educational objectives,” the report noted.22

Brooks Parker, one of the rejected students, approached Louis Redding, Delaware’s only Black lawyer at the time, who was playing a leading role in desegregating the state’s educational institutions. Redding, who grew up a block from Rodney Square in Wilmington, had become the state’s sole Black attorney when he returned to Delaware in 1929, having graduated from Harvard Law School the prior year, and he remained the state’s only Black lawyer until 1954.

Redding wrote to Judge Hugh M. Morris, chair of the board of trustees, noting the inferior education offered at Delaware State College, outlining all the advantages that the University of Delaware had over the Black school. The university then had forty-four tenured full professors and thirty-three associate professors, while the college had just four full professors, none of whom enjoyed tenure. The university library housed 140,000 books, the college library just 16,000. The university had extensive athletic facilities, including a swimming pool and gym, which the college lacked. The State of Delaware created thirty-three scholarships and prizes at the university, but just one at the college.

The university should therefore properly reconsider the applicants, Redding wrote. Morris replied that he would look into it, and Redding asked him to do so promptly. After several weeks, the board met to discuss the issue, and rebuffed the students a second time, again referring to the 1948 resolution.

It was clear that Redding would now have to resort to suing the university. He teamed up with Jack Greenberg, who a year earlier had become the only white legal counselor for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The two came to admire each other greatly. Redding, said Greenberg, “was the one man in a whole state actually standing up and doing something with decency.” Redding said of Greenberg, “Jack is not a man to spill his guts over what’s inside him.

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